


Small Kindnesses

by ophelia_interrupted



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Oral Sex, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:21:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelia_interrupted/pseuds/ophelia_interrupted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sick Hannibal is comforted by a friend with benefits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Kindnesses

            Hannibal had had better nights.  He was lying on a flea-filled straw tick mattress on the floor of a whorehouse attic, wracked with chills, too ill to rise, and perilously close to the edge of opium withdrawal.  He’d been crying on and off since his lamp had burned out, leaving him in the dark and unable to so much as read to take his mind off the nausea and suffocating pain in his chest.  Weeping congested him and made his coughing worse, but sometimes tears were the only answer to the circumstances he managed to put himself in. 

            There was what sounded like a full-scale riot going on downstairs, complete with the occasional splintering crash of furniture being destroyed, so he missed the sound of footsteps on the stairs.  He jumped when the ill-hung attic door scraped open, and then wiped his eyes quickly with his sodden handkerchief, grateful that he was lying with his face to the wall.  He heard the slurry rustle of skirts punctuated by the thud of heavy boots, and guessed his visitor was probably Pie-Face Sue, a whore who was particularly fond of him.  Shakily, he said, “Good evening, Mademoiselle.  I swear I would rise and kiss your hand if it were in any way possible for me to do so.” 

            “Sure thing, Hannibal.  Brought you some grits,” Sue said, and he heard her set a tin plate down on the box that served him for a table.  The pale orange light that cast wobbling shadows on the wall indicated that she’d brought a candle, too.  He wondered if she’d take away that morning’s plate of grits, which he’d barely touched, when she left.  The thought of eating made his stomach clench with sickness. 

            “I don’t suppose you managed to find any of my opium bottles?”  Someone had done an unusually thorough sweep through his room the previous day, and relieved him of his entire stash while he was out.  Generally, Sue’s compatriots just took surreptitious swigs and then slipped water into the bottles, to make up the difference.  Somebody must have been desperate this time.  This left him with just the bottle of rum he’d been nursing all day, which was a poor substitute for laudanum. 

            “Just one, but it was empty,” Sue said. 

            “Alas,” Hannibal said with a sigh, then propped himself up on one elbow so he could take a slug of rum.  “ _Dissipat Evius curas edaces_.”  

            Suddenly he fell to coughing, the violence of it laying him flat again.  He tasted blood.  He heard Sue sit down on the floor at his back, and to his surprise she began to stroke his long hair with one of her big hands.  Her touch was surprisingly light for such a large, clumsy-looking woman.  “Been bad, huh?” she asked gently.

            It was as if she’d given him permission to drop the façade of his usual cheerful insouciance, and express how much he hurt.  For an instant he was on the verge of tears again.  Unable to answer her, he just pressed his handkerchief to his bloodied mouth and struggled for control.  Heaven knew there wasn’t much dignity in the life of a consumptive addict, and he resolved not to part with what little he had.  He didn’t want her to see him at his lowest ebb. 

            She just continued to stroke his hair as he slowly got hold of himself.  “When I was a girl, my sister died of the consumption,” Sue said.  “It was nasty.  A bad way to go.”

            Hannibal supposed he could have done without the reminder of exactly what awaited him in a few months or years, but he appreciated her gentle touch and the sympathy in her voice.  Once he was calmer, he rolled over to face her and took her hand in his, lightly kissing her knuckles as his dark eyes gazed into her washed-out blue ones.  “Thank you,” he said.  Pie-Face Sue’s nickname was regrettably apt.  She’d started out life with a round, flattish face, and then at some point someone had smashed her nose for her, leaving it a twisted bump that made her profile look like the slightly convex surface of a pie.  He wasn’t sure how she’d ended up on the game, but he was sure it wasn’t by her free choice.  It never was, for any of them.

            “It’s nothing,” Sue said.  She brushed one thumb along the puffy, sore skin beneath one of Hannibal’s eyes, and said, “You look like you’ve had the devil’s own time.”

            “ _Which way I fly is Hell.  Myself am Hell_ ,” he quoted brightly. 

            “Whatever that’s supposed to mean,” she said with a wry smile.  Then she added, “Move over.”

            He did, giving her space on the thin, lumpy mattress to lie down.  She gathered him to her, and he wrapped his arm around her waist.  This close, she smelled like unwashed clothes, wood smoke, and rum, but it wasn’t such an unpleasant smell.  It was also far from unpleasant to lie in a woman’s arms, especially considering the chills he’d been having.  She was warm and her embrace was steadying, and while he doubted he was going to be able to sleep, he thought he might be able to doze a little. 

            Eventually she stirred, and he turned to her, deeply grateful.  “You are a very dear woman,” he said.  “ _Uno spirito celeste, un vivo sole . . ._ ” He kissed her cheek, then the other cheek, then the pit of her throat.

            He realized he’d gone too far when she pushed him away.  “No,” she said flatly.  “Not for free.  Not even for you.”

            He hadn’t actually been trying to initiate sex, but he doubted she’d believe him.  She sat up, and he saw in her face that she was listening for what was going on downstairs.  The fight seemed to have broken up, and all that was audible now was the thump of beds hitting the wall and men grunting.  Somewhere, the voice of a woman quite obviously faking orgasm trilled up and up.  Sue seemed to remember that she needed to make money to eat and pay the rent on her room, and she was in the process of getting up when Hannibal caught her wrist.

            “Stay.  Please,” he said. 

            She looked down at him and said, “I can’t.”

            He knew better than to try and get her to stay for nothing, and his mind ran over the very short list of what he had to offer.  In the end, he held out his bottle of rum, which had about four fingers of pungent dark liquid left in it.  He looked up at her, an unspoken plea in his eyes. 

            “All right,” she said at last, as if against her better judgment.  She took the bottle and knocked back a slug from its neck.  “What do you want me to do?”

            In truth, he would have been happy just to have her hold him a while longer, but he wasn’t going to turn down an offer of sex if she made one.  “What would you like to do?” he asked.

            She looked away and then took another long drink of rum.  Too late, he realized that the answer to that question was likely: _live a life that didn’t require her to have sex in the attic of a whorehouse._   “Why don’t I suck you off,” she said at last, setting the bottle down, much depleted.  “That’s quick, and you’ll like it.”

            Hannibal did happen to like that, very much, and so he settled back on the mattress while she lifted the blanket off him and pulled up the front of his nightshirt.  The air was chilly and he shivered, a movement that ended in a fierce bout of coughing.  Sue seemed to remember that he was a sick friend as well as a client, and she lightly caressed the inside of his thigh.  After he finally stopped coughing, he made a small, contented noise as she got down to the business of stroking his cock.  Utterly soft at the beginning, he hardened up quickly under her ministrations.  She kissed the tip once, as a hint of things to come, and then she took him in her mouth. 

            The pleasure was electrifying, seeming to run up his spine and suffuse his whole body with warmth.  He had a hard time holding still as she bobbed her head up and down, providing a delicious friction.  Before long, he’d been drawn so far toward ecstasy that he forgot the pain in his chest and the nauseated clenchings of his stomach.  Sue was being very good to him indeed.  For a few moments he sang snatches of the Chorale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in between gasps, and then orgasm jolted him, and he cried out. 

            She spat afterward, not very romantic of her, but he didn’t blame her, considering.  She then covered him up again, and for a moment cupped the side of his face with her hand.  “Go to sleep,” she said, and then she left, taking the light with her.  He sighed, seeing her go.

            The post-coital afterglow finally allowed him to doze.  When he inevitably awakened coughing, he sat up with a groan and reached for his violin.  With an effort, he propped himself up against the wall and began to play the melody of the Chorale from Beethoven’s Ninth, slower than one usually heard it, and tenderly, like a lover’s caress in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Hannibal's quotes: 
> 
> Dissipat Evius Curas edaces.   
> \--Horace  
> "Bacchus dissipates preying cares."
> 
> Which way I fly is Hell. Myself am Hell  
> \--Milton, "Paradise Lost"
> 
> Uno spirito celeste, un vivo sole  
> \--Petrarch  
> "A celestial spirit, a living sun"


End file.
